Immediately after the American Revolution, the founders set about the task of ensuring the continued existence of the fledgling republic. Facing a host of problems—economic, social, and governmental—some founders promoted a concept of schooling that would inculcate patriotism and forge a uniquely American identity. Noah Webster wanted to create an American language, and Benjamin Rush wanted schools to “convert men into republican machines.” Webster, Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and others all wanted to use some version of common schooling to instill in children a sense of nationalism. Textbooks used in these common schools would be a likely way to further promote a sense of American identity. What that identity should be, though, and what the “good citizen” of the new republic should look like, was sharply contested, and textbooks of this period reflect many of the fissures in the work of nation building.

In 1927, nursery school educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell heralded Jean Piaget's psychology as of “outstanding interest” and wrote in Progressive Education that it should be of “immense service” to psychologists, teachers, and parents. In 1929, psychologist Lois Meek praised Piaget's research in the National Society for the Study of Education's yearbook on preschool and parental education. In 1931, the National Association for Nursery Education bibliography on nursery school-based research, for which Meek was on the editorial board, included no mention of Piaget at all.

Since its founding in 1939, the Oram Group has been a maverick in the field of fundraising, lending its expertise to the areas of education, welfare, social action, civil rights, the arts, and the environment. Beginning with the organization's founder, Harold Oram, continuing to the current president and chief executive officer Henry Goldstein, Oram staff members have had an interest in supporting progressive (i.e., social justice-oriented) causes. Influenced by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and Lyndon B. Johnson's vision of a Great Society, the Oram Group staff has been steadfast in its dedication, with founder Harold Oram referring to the organization's work as “saving the world.” This approach was different from that of earlier fundraising organizations, such as Marts and Lundy or John Price Jones—firms that worked, by and large, with elite white institutions and with black colleges under the direction of white philanthropists. For example, according to Robert L . Payton, for Arnaud C. Marts [and his colleagues at Marts and Lundy],

Just days after the start of the 1994-1995 school year, almost a quarter of the student body at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, California did not show up for class. Latino organizers had asked parents to keep their children out of school to protest what they perceived as school administrators' inadequate response to Latino educational needs. Parents of approximately one hundred of the school's 431 students heeded the call. Although one out of four was only slighdy above the daily absentee rate for a normal school day, the nature of these absences forced district administrators to take notice. The rhetoric that Latino activists used when describing the management of Compton's public schools served as the most disquieting aspect of the walkout. “The Compton Unified School District is like Mississippi,” asserted John Ortega, the lead counsel for the Union of Parents and Students of Compton United, the association that organized the attendance strikes. “In Mississippi, they didn't want to educate blacks in the ‘50s, and in the ‘90s, Compton doesn't want to educate Latinos.”